


honey when i'm above the trees

by surreptitiously



Category: Little Women (2019)
Genre: F/F
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-02-10
Updated: 2021-02-10
Packaged: 2021-03-16 22:48:50
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 8,142
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/29340093
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/surreptitiously/pseuds/surreptitiously
Summary: “Oh, you’ve met our professor, as we like to call her,” says Mrs Kirke, half turned away from Jo already, occupied with the small sticky girl tugging at her skirts and the basket of laundry at her hip. “Jo, meet Frieda Bhaer, you’ll find that there’s never a dull moment here, we’ve all sorts under this roof, intellectuals and Europeans, I never thought I’d end up in this life but I like it –”Jo meets Frieda Bhaer in New York.
Relationships: Friedrich Bhaer/Josephine March
Comments: 3
Kudos: 10





	honey when i'm above the trees

**Author's Note:**

> Title from "happiness" by Taylor Swift, whose fault this is in a very real way because of all the psychic damage I got from the various Little Women 2019 music videos set to "champagne problems" that were circulated after her surprise album dropped, which caused me to rewatch Little Women 2019 and think about my favourite hypothesis, which is that although Greta did some fine work in making Friedrich Bhaer hot, the only real way to make it make sense is if Jo is a lesbian and Bhaer is a girl. So instead of boring my friends about it for the fiftieth time, I figured I might as well take a crack at what that might look like.
> 
> Jo/Laurie is of course real and clearly in an IDEAL world Amy/Laurie would also be lesbians but there's only so much time a girl has. Some things are the same, as you'll be able to see from the lines of dialogue that have been lifted directly from the screenplay, some things are different, it's all very sentimental. I think Bhaer is a languages teacher in the book but I'm going with Greta's vision, anything else that seems wrong is probably just a mistake.

“Oh, you’ve met our professor, as we like to call her,” says Mrs Kirke, half turned away from Jo already, occupied with the small sticky girl tugging at her skirts and the basket of laundry at her hip. “Jo, meet Frieda Bhaer, you’ll find that there’s never a dull moment here, we’ve all sorts under this roof, intellectuals and Europeans, I never thought I’d end up in this life but I like it –”

* * *

_Bethy, you’d hate the noise of it here_ , Jo writes, _it’s never quiet, not even at night, and I didn’t think I’d ever get used to it._ To Meg, _there’s so much life here, it makes me realise how big the world is_ , to Marmee, _I enclose twenty dollars for you and Father and Beth, and all the love I can scrounge up from the bottom of my heart._

 _My darling girl_ , Marmee writes back, _but are you eating well? Have you enough warm things? Are the people friendly to you?_

 _Yes,_ Jo writes, and then hesitates, suddenly unsure. A drop of ink falls and she curses, rubbing ineffectually at it. _The girls have another teacher for their music classes. I like the look of her face and mean to make friends with her._

Which is true, she reasons with herself. Jo _did_ like the look of Frieda Bhaer’s face, at least the glimpses she's caught of it passing through the corridors of Mrs Kirke's house: the high European forehead, her aquiline nose, her dark, merry eyes. She looked like how the heroines in Jo’s plays should have looked, if Meg’s face hadn’t been so sweet and clear; how the heroines of Jo’s stories for the papers did look, if only in her mind, as they went about their business of falling in love and declaiming speeches and being rescued from dark dungeons. 

And Jo did mean to make friends with her, if only she could think of the best, most perfect thing to say. There’s a dim little voice in the back of her mind that says, _if only you get it right first time, then…_

She writes to Laurie, too, cheerful and anxious. He doesn’t write back.

* * *

In the end, the incident of the scorched gown ("Which one?" Amy would have said) makes her see things quite differently. The shape of the mark on Frieda’s coffee-coloured gown is so identical to the one on Jo’s own that it surprises a laugh out of her, and there’s something shy and pleased in the other woman’s face when she looks at Jo. 

“We should call it a trend, perhaps,” she says. “The new fashion of New York?”

“My sister Amy would have something to say about that,” says Jo. “She’s in Paris, studying art and becoming extremely fashionable. Which is not something I know about.”

“Nor I,” says Frieda, smiling at her.

“But you don’t need to,” Jo says, unthinkingly. “I mean –” Mrs Kirke bustles into the room, the little girls tumbling around her, and Jo seizes the opportunity to escape with relief, finishing, “I should get to work.”

“Who needs fashion?” says Freida. “I would rather be warm beside the fire. Or have ink stains like yours, which become you.”

“Oh, well,” says Jo, the heat rising unaccountably in her cheeks. She folds her hands together so she can’t see the telltale residue of her late night, self-conscious.

“Nobody gets those for the sake of work,” Frieda says, watching her. “Love, maybe.”

“I write,” Jo says, abstractedly, and then gathers herself together, attempting to sound brisk. “And now I must teach. Money never sleeps.”

“Not in this city,” agrees Frieda. “Goodbye, Jo.”

“Goodbye,” says Jo, and flees.

* * *

At first, the attic would send a pang of homesickness through Jo, half-expecting to emerge into the garret at home every time she ascended the stairs at night. Gradually, though, it feels lived-in, a home of Jo’s own; which is also strange, to have a different home. Between lessons, she tramps upstairs to scribble to the tune of the girls’ stilted violin playing and very faintly, the patient sound of Frieda’s voice, and at night her candle flickers long into the small hours, casting faint shadows.

It’s on a night like this that she looks up from her work, shaking a cramp from her hand, to realise how hungry she is. 

She'd missed dinner with the other lodgers to wait in line for the cheap seats at the Winter Garden. The play had been As You Like It, one of her favourites, and as soon as she'd arrived home she'd run upstairs to get down an idea it had given her for a story set in a forest. It's not the first time this has happened, or that she's emerged blinking from a fugue state of creativity as hungry as a horse, and she knows from past experience that Mrs Kirke doesn't mind her helping herself to the loaf of bread and the pat of butter that sits on the counter. 

She's thinking about the characters as she takes the stairs down, two at a time before she belatedly remembers how late it is and stills herself. By the time she's at the bottom she's remembering the play itself, the sly glitter in Rosalind's eyes when she'd lifted her skirts in the final epilogue to reveal her old boyish breeches. 

She’s developed a nervous, anticipatory habit of looking for Frieda in the crowds of people flooding out into the freezing New York night, but she hasn't seen her at the theatre in a few days, not since the night that Jo had followed her and her cousins to the dance hall. That had been a good night, the kind that feels bathed in the same sort of warm glow as the nights she remembers from that golden time before Beth was sick and Meg got married, to the point that in her memories it feels almost like if she'd only turned around, her sister would be there in her beloved purple poplin, Laurie would be winking at her out of the darkness. 

But she hadn't turned around all night, too caught up in the moment and the music and the dancing. And it wasn't really like those nights – at least not how they'd ended up, with Meg in the middle of the room talking earnestly to a polished young man or another who was visibly falling in love with her, and Laurie looking with that terrible, complicated look at Jo where she stood at the side of the room feeling about as conspicuous as a water buffalo.

She'd danced with Frieda's cousins and known it didn't matter, nothing that happened would change anything, and was exhilarated by it. Now, she can scarcely recall their faces, let alone their names, and when she thinks of the night, she remembers mainly noise and heat and Frieda's eyes meeting hers across the room, fever-bright and grinning, again, and again.

"Jo?" she hears, suddenly, and she yelps, dropping the knife with which she'd been carving herself a generous slice of bread, lost in her reverie. When she looks up, Frieda is there, and there's a confused moment in the shadows of the kitchen where she doesn't quite know where she is.

"Oh," she says, belatedly, and then, "Ow."

"You're bleeding," Frieda says, and is suddenly in front of Jo, retrieving a handkerchief from the folds of her dress. It's not a woman's handkerchief, Jo notes, absently, as she submits to having her hand wrapped up tightly in it. It's big and plain and white, though becoming less white by the second. 

"Wait," she says. "Stop, it'll stain."

"I feel responsible," says Frieda gravely. "I should not have startled you."

"Yes, but the person it belongs to might care," Jo says, and bites her tongue. "Sorry. It wasn't your fault, I probably would've done it anyway. I drop things all the time." 

Frieda peers down at her curiously. She's one of the tallest women Jo has ever met, almost as tall as Marmee, though she wears it differently. "It's mine," she says. 

"Oh," says Jo, and focuses on her hand. They both look down at it. 

"The women's ones are too small," says Frieda after a second. "They could be useful to a little child, perhaps. A baby."

This is an opinion Jo has always privately shared, though Beth has hemmed so many for her that she'd managed to keep it to herself. "An ant, maybe," she says. 

"Exactly," says Frieda, and releases her hand with a pat. "Keep it tied all night. The wound is not deep."

Freed, Jo starts to back away. "Thank you," she says.

"Stay," says Frieda. "You were hungry, I think? So was I."

Jo looks at her, and at the bread. Hunger wins out. "Well, alright," she says. 

When they're sat at the table, Frieda having taken the knife firmly from Jo, she sneaks a sideways look at her. The other woman is spreading butter quite contentedly, and Jo suddenly isn't at all sure why she was ever nervous. "My sister once hurt her hand just like this," she says. "Well, _she_ didn't hurt it. She got in trouble at school for drawing funny pictures of the teacher."

"She sounds like you," says Frieda, and some of the immediate horror Jo feels at this notion must be evident on her face, because she laughs. "What happened next? Was she sorry?"

"Oh, no," says Jo. "Amy doesn't feel sorry for things, not unless you really make her. She was only frightened of being in trouble at home, so she went to – to our neighbour's house, but when Marmee found out, she was so cross at the teacher she took her out of school."

She takes a mouthful of bread. "That school was terrible, anyway," she says, around it, conscious she’s babbling but not quite sure why. "She and my sister Beth learned their lessons just fine at home. Education for girls in this country –"

"Is a disgrace," Frieda says, along with her. Jo blinks at her, thrown off, and swallows. 

"I have often said it," Frieda continues, her eyes suddenly bright. "Girls need good teachers as much as boys do. They have minds every bit as good as boys. It’s an absolute –"

"Waste," Jo says, and points at her. " _Exactly_. Exactly."

Frieda sits back and smiles at her. "I think the Misses Kirke are a lucky exception."

"Oh," says Jo. "Well, I don't know about that. Maybe for the violin."

"I cannot make them practice," Frieda says, ruefully. "So on the whole, I think not. One cannot get by on talent alone."

"You can say that again," says Jo, slumping. “And I bet music pays just as much as writing does.”

“Which is to say, not at all,” Frieda agrees. “But I have nobody, so this life allows me to get by. An advantage, I suppose.”

Something in her voice makes Jo look at her, but her face is blank, looking down at her empty plate.

“Sometimes I wish I had no responsibilities,” Jo offers. 

Frieda looks up at her, then, and smiles, kind. “No, you don’t,” she says, and stands. “And now, I think, bedtime.”

* * *

Laurie still won't write. Jo isn't sure what to do with the implacable fact of that, something that can't be talked or cajoled or argued into becoming acceptable. He’s further away than he’s been since Jo first met him, and it’s awful to write to him, to gather up the nerve at her desk and put on the old camaraderie, like the guilt and panicky fury hasn’t stretched it all out of shape.

Eventually she stops and tries not to think about him. It’s easy enough in New York, where life moves twice as fast as it did at home and there are distractions on every street corner. It’s only in the odd moments where she’s alone that it sneaks back in, up in her room or walking through the orange glow of the streetlights as the sun sets earlier and earlier, and she’s hit with such a jolt of pure melancholic loneliness that she has to blink away foolish tears. 

But her stories are selling, Kitty and Minnie are acquiescing to their lessons with surprising grace, and going home won’t change things back to the way they used to be. She sends home another cheque and finds herself eager for friendship wherever she can get it, making conversation with the postman and the greengrocer and Mrs Kirke over the kitchen table. 

Naturally this also includes Frieda Bhaer, particularly after she wakes up to find the book outside her room. And even better, the note: she rolls around the words in her mind, liking the weight and polish of them, and feels like a real grown-up.

 _Thank you so much for the book_ , she writes back carefully, managing not to blot the ink. _It's the most beautiful thing I've ever owned. And I would love to show you my writing. You can read the next story I finish._

* * *

The forest story is going well; it's shaping up to be one of the longest Jo has written. She keeps thinking of more to put in it: bandits and duchesses and dens of iniquity, romance and crime and ghosts. Her heroine is a girl in disguise in boys' clothing, and her setting is somewhere far away, where there are universities with boys who lounge about and behave badly and towns filled with prim young women practicing their accomplishments and the unspecific national demeanour is characterised by softly accented voices and slow, sweet smiles.

The next time she runs into Frieda in the kitchen, Jo isn't expecting it, but she's not surprised, either.

“We should stop meeting like this,” she says, in a manner she considers approximately French and urbane. Frieda arches an eyebrow.

“Let’s hope nobody bleeds this time,” she says, and gestures to a seat, putting her book to the side. Jo isn’t quite sure what to do with the pages from an old story she’s brought down to go through so she sits on them. 

“What are you reading?” she says. Frieda tilts the book up towards her: it’s _Sense and Sensibility._

“Oh, I’ve only read _Emma_ ,” Jo says. 

“Did you like it?”

“She reminded me of my sister Amy,” says Jo, and her tone must speak for her, because Frieda laughs. 

“Well, how do you like the Shakespeare?”

“Oh, I love it,” Jo says eagerly. “I’ve only ever seen the plays before. It’s very interesting to see them written down.”

“There’s something new to notice every time,” Frieda says. 

“It made me realise how much I’ve missed,” Jo says. “And I can’t tell you how many ideas it’s given me. I’m actually writing –” she breaks off, and bites her lip.

“Tell me,” Frieda says. 

“Oh, alright,” says Jo. “I got the idea from As You Like It.”

"Ah yes," Frieda says. "I'm sorry I missed it. Though I prefer Twelfth Night."

"You do?" Jo says. "As You Like It is funnier, I think."

"True," Frieda says. "But the ending is too neat – too much of an ending. Real life rarely fits so well. Why should Orlando forgive Oliver? It's like Shakespeare waved a magic wand over them – and magically, everything gets fixed.” 

“You’d be surprised what you can forgive,” Jo says. “Forgetting’s harder. What I never understood was how Celia could love him. You should have seen the actress who was her, the other night. She looked just like my sister Meg.”

“The way you tell it, every story in the world is about the March family,” Frieda says, smiling.

Jo laughs, feeling the heat rise in her cheeks. “Maybe.”

They sit there for a second in silence before Jo cracks.

“Do you mind if I’m very unsociable?” she says, retrieving her story from underneath her. “Only I wanted to go through this.”

Frieda blinks “You finished it already?”

"No, it's an old one," Jo says. "Only it's the twins' birthday soon – my niece and nephew – and I need to send their present by the end of the week if it's to arrive on time. And I need money to buy their present."

“Of course,” Frieda says. “Please.”

“Thank you,” Jo says, and, feeling strangely self-conscious, bends her head over her writing.

* * *

A week later, the story is done. She takes it to Mr. Dashwood right away, and when she lets herself back into the house, she's fizzing with excitement. There's nobody in the parlour, just Frieda, and with a touch of the old giddy excitement, she descends upon her, whirling her out of her chair to dance her around the room.

"What is this?" says Frieda, laughing, but going along gamely with it. 

"The Post is going to run my story," Jo says. " _No cuts_! Well, one cut. One _small_ cut."

"Now you'll let me read it?" Frieda says, a little out of breath. 

"You can read it now!" Jo declares, letting her go and spinning her away. "I have the rough copy upstairs. And you haven't heard the best part!"

"What's the best part?" says Frieda, standing where Jo left her, something very soft in her voice that Jo only registers with a fragment of her consciousness.

"It's being serialised!" Jo says. "In four issues. The first time ever." 

"Four issues?" Frieda says. "Well, that is remarkable. And four times as big a cheque, hm?" 

Jo stops, and whirls back over, grabbing her wrists. This is not an angle she had previously considered.

"Four times as much," she breathes, and throws an arm around Frieda, hugging her close and pulling away to kiss her. 

Though there was little intent behind it, it was the friendly, boyish, smacking sort of kiss that Jo had kissed her family, Laurie, even Aunt March with all her life. But Frieda breathes in, a sharp little intake of breath, and as a natural consequence her mouth moves on Jo's, and then her arm slides down behind her, and suddenly it's Jo who can't breathe.

There's a long, confused, shivery moment where Jo can't think and then, faintly, the front door clicks open. It takes half a second for the sound to penetrate her dazed consciousness and then she leaps back. 

Frieda looks bewildered, standing stock still like she's been deposited abruptly in some unknown land, her cheeks red and her hair escaping from its usual neat knot. It's the first time Jo has ever seen her lose her composure, and she runs her hands through her own hair, down over her own hot cheeks. 

"I mean –" she stammers. "I'm –"

Frieda looks at her, mute and wide-eyed.

"I should go," Jo says, seizing on the words with a sense of relief. "I need to – go."

Without waiting for a reply, she does. 

* * *

That night, Jo thinks about home until she makes herself feel sick with it. It's all there when she closes her eyes, bright and sharp like she can feel it on her skin. Beth's kitten sleeping in Father's boots, how red Marmee's cheeks would get coming in from the cold, Amy investigating her own nose in the mirror with all the vigilance of a jeweller looking for imperfections. Beth, lifting her fingers from the keys of her old piano and smiling up at Jo; the smell of the two drops of good perfume that Meg assiduously daubed behind her ears before a party. The first cherry blossoms in spring, the dry grass in August, the absolute silence when it snowed. Jo can put herself into it so completely that opening her eyes to the rafters of Mrs Kirke's roof cuts like a loss. 

Everything at home had been so thoroughly _known_. Even things she had disdained, or not paid much attention to: John Brooke laughing with Meg at a picnic, Mr Laurence's footsteps pacing in his office. Things she's tried to forget: her hand in Laurie's pocket, his clothes in her wardrobe, his head on her shoulder. 

Inevitably she begins to worry at the memory of Laurie's agonised face on the windy hill with the guilty relief of picking at a scab she's tried very hard to let heal. But even that hadn't surprised her, not really. It's possible to understand something without wanting to.

Things are different in New York. She's felt it on several occasions, just when she thinks she's getting used to it. She'd arrived there like a character in a play, sure of what she wanted and ready for the world to unfurl at her feet, but life alone in the city, where she isn't a sister or daughter or friend but just plain Jo March, has a habit of jolting her out of the story she'd imagined for the version of herself who was all those things. Sometimes she looks up at the people around her like she's realising for the first time that they're there, and that she has no idea what their lives are really like. She can't even guess at it. 

It's an alarming sensation for a writer. She's supposed to be an observer of human nature. Perhaps when she'd first set out into the world it was acceptable that there were things she didn't know, but the more she tries to chip away at the vast hidden expanse of everything she can’t put into words, the richer and more mysterious and more impenetrable it becomes.

She rolls over and pulls a pillow over her head. There isn’t any use dwelling on it. All she can do is work, and isn’t she making progress? Hasn’t she sold her best story yet; and for four times as much as any of the others? Perhaps, if only she keeps going, she’ll understand more, eventually. 

She’ll show Frieda her story tomorrow, she decides suddenly, and feels better immediately. She’d promised she would, and anyway, why shouldn’t she? Nothing has changed. At least, nothing Jo can quantify.

* * *

It’s surprisingly nervewracking, when the moment comes, to hand over her writing. Frieda is wearing her reading glasses, and Jo thinks suddenly of how Mrs Kirke calls her the Professor. She understands why. There’s a nervous crackling energy in the air between them, but Jo is pretty sure it’s because of her own apprehensiveness. Frieda seems to have picked up on some of what Jo is feeling. Her shoulders are tense as she takes the pages from Jo.

An eternity seems to pass while she reads, Jo watching her face closely.

“Well?” she says, when Frieda turns the last page, and she can’t bear it any longer. “What do you think?”

Frieda looks up at her, a little slowly, and opens her mouth. Their eyes meet and Jo feels something turn over in her stomach. Frieda blinks, and says, almost like she can’t help it, “I don’t like it.”

It’s devastating. “What?” Jo says.

Frieda sighs, and takes off her glasses.

“It doesn’t seem,” she makes a slight noise of frustrated wordlessness, “true, you know? These stories – bandits and killing and – and romance – what is there of Jo March in them?”

“They’re mine,” Jo says blankly. “I wrote them.”

“But they’re not _of_ you,” Frieda says. “There’s something missing.”

“Well, I’ll put it in,” Jo says, rallying. “Does it need to be longer? I want to write a novel next –”

“No, no,” Frieda says. “It’s not about changing this. It’s not – it’s not good.”

Jo feels like someone has poured a bucket of ice cold water over her. “I’ve always been told – my stories are in the papers, people say I’m talented –”

“You are talented,” Frieda says. “I would not say so otherwise. But why do you write under a pseudonym?”

“My mother wouldn’t like them,” Jo says. “I don’t want her to worry, I want her to take the money. But –”

Frieda nods, looking at Jo like she can see right through her, and Jo is suddenly so angry she feels like she could burst. 

“I can’t afford to starve on praise,” she says curtly, gathering up her papers.

“Are you upset?”

“Of course I’m upset,” Jo says. “And anyway, who made you High Priest of what’s good and what’s not?”

“No one, and I’m not,” Frieda says, beginning to adopt that bewildered look again. In an instant Jo remembers the way her hair had looked yesterday, beginning to come loose, and flushes red. 

“Then why are you acting like it?”

“I thought you wanted honesty,” she says. “Has nobody spoken honestly to you before?”

“Believe me, I’ve been rejected plenty of times –”

“It’s not about rejection, it’s about taking your work seriously –”

“Well, if you know so much about it, why don’t _you_ do it?” Jo says, breathing hard. “Or why don’t you take your music seriously, or do _something_ real –”

“I don’t have the gift you have,” Frieda says, steadily. She meets Jo’s eye.

“You don’t,” Jo says. “And nobody will remember the critics, you won’t make a single mark on the world, but I’ll –”

“Well, I’m sure –”

“Nobody will forget Jo March,” Jo says, and squares her shoulders, trying to speak with more conviction than she feels.

“Nobody could,” Frieda says. “But ask yourself if you would feel this way if you thought there was no truth in what I say.”

They look at each other for a long moment, before Frieda opens her mouth again, but sudden panic rises in Jo’s throat, and she speaks first, swiftly, edging towards the door.

“We aren’t friends. I don’t want your opinion, because I don’t like you very much, so – thank you. Goodbye.”

Jo has always been good at having the last word.

She walks for hours and hours in the winter night, striding through the streets until some of the emotion burns itself away. Eventually she ends up back at the boarding house, staring up at the lit windows, and she realises that it’s gone. She just feels tired, and she misses her mother. She opens the door and wonders if Frieda is inside, somewhere. 

Then Mrs Kirke comes out of the parlour and tells her, _Telegram for you, Josephine,_ and everything changes so irrevocably that it stops mattering, anyway.

* * *

After Beth dies everything is all wrong. Not just the terrible absence where she used to be, not just the lost way Father sits at the breakfast table, not just the terrifying topsy-turvy sense Jo has on occasion that Marmee needs looking after. Jo feels wrong in her skin. At night she lies awake and feels the silent darkness pressing down on her.

What it comes down to is that she’d gone toe-to-toe with God, and she’d lost. Beth would hate that she thought of it that way, but she can’t shake the conviction that there must have been _something_ she could have done. Maybe she’d come home too late; maybe she should have made Marmee write Amy and bring her home, and all four sisters would have been together. Maybe she shouldn’t have left for New York in the first place. 

She examines her memories again with a forensic eye, returning again and again to that moment on the hill. There had been several years where Laurie had simply been an extension of her own body, and she can recall exactly the smell of his hair, the long line of his shoulders as she threw an arm over them, his long fingers carding through the newly short hair at the nape of her neck. If they'd been characters in a play, that proximity would have indicated love. 

Marmee says, “You’re too lonely, Jo. Wouldn’t you like to go back to New York? What about your friends there? Frieda, was that her name?”

Hearing her name makes Jo remember that strange instant in Mrs Kirke's parlour again, the skin of Frieda's cheek close and soft, and her stomach jolts. She's thought about going back to New York plenty, but what she really wants is to roll up the months she spent there and land on the doorstep of the boarding house for the first time again, fresh from the train.

But there are only some things you can take back. She does feel the old love for Laurie, ready in her heart and comfortable as a blanket, even if there are parts of her that feel too big, too awkwardly shaped to fit in it. 

She doesn’t imagine she’ll ever see Frieda again. She’d been right, anyway. Jo’s old stories had lacked a certain weight. 

* * *

Meg has to go home for the children's teatime otherwise they'll cry, but she promises to bring them back to the house afterwards. They've already been there an hour and Jo is hungry herself but she says yes to prolong the moment, more for the sake of her sisters than the house itself.

The old comradeship is mostly gone now, each of them too different and grown-up to share the solidarity of lessons and dinners and play with each other, but in some ways it makes it easier. The absence of Beth is less jagged, even if Jo still feels it keenly.

Amy does, too, she thinks. They haven't spent much time alone together since she came back – or, really, ever. But she only needs to look at her sister to remember when it had been Jo-and-Meg, Beth-and-Amy, for all they'd been so different. Jo wonders if she wishes she'd been called home from Europe to say goodbye; if Jo regrets not writing to fetch her. 

To distract herself from this line of thinking, she turns on her heel and walks back into the house. No clear destination in mind but she ends up in the old library where she'd spent so much time, and spends a while running a finger through the dust, opening some of her old favourites. 

" _Are_ you going to turn it into a school?" Amy says, trailing into the room. She leans against the windowsill, her expression hard to make out against the light. 

"I don't know," Jo says, but she does know. She's been imagining it, little girls running through the corridors, the house alive as it had never been during those interminable afternoons with Aunt March. "It'd be a lot of work just for me."

"Well, you wouldn't be alone," Amy says. "Women of society must occupy their time with worthy projects."

Jo makes a face and she laughs. "Why not? Meg could teach theatre, I could teach art…"

"Leaving all the sensible subjects to Mr Brooke," Jo says, giving up and walking over to her. Amy moves over readily and Jo sits at the opposite end of the sill, looking at her sister's face cross-hatched with light and shadow.

"You could teach writing," Amy says. "And if we all helped you'd have time to write. Properly, I mean."

"I don't think I can write properly," Jo says. "Dabbling, maybe."

"You do so write properly," Amy says, her old petulant self breaking out for a second. "Or you wouldn't write at all."

"Why don't you paint anymore?" Jo says. "Why do you have to give that up just because you got married? Just because you're a society woman, or whatever you're calling it –"

"It's not that," Amy says with dignity. "I'm not talented. I learned that in Paris before Laurie even said anything."

"Well, I learned it in New York," Jo says. 

"Oh, stop being so – _maudlin_ ," Amy says. "I'm happy now, as I am. You're not satisfied, Jo March, and I don't understand why. You're free – you don't have to worry about money anymore. The school will pay for itself, and I'm here to look after Father and Marmee, and you too if it doesn't. _You_ never wanted to be rich."

There's a long silence, broken by the distant sound of children squealing. Meg is walking slowly back up the road, Daisy and Demi gambolling around her, and Laurie is with her. They both watch him sweep Daisy up onto his shoulders, prompting Demi to scream in outrage.

"Can I ask you something?" Jo says, keeping her eyes trained out of the window. "What do you feel? For Laurie? 

"Well, I love him," Amy says easily, then looks at Jo, who watches her expression in the glass. Something in her face shifts in understanding

"I always know where he is in a room," she says, quietly. "I like looking at him – I always have. I always notice something new. I like standing close to him, like if someone wants one of us, they'll have to take the other, too. He's – he's sweet, more than I ever thought he could truthfully be. And I like that he takes care of me, and that I take care of him."

"Oh," Jo says. Amy looks out at her husband, her eyes soft, then trains her gaze back on Jo's reflection, ghostly and uncertain in the golden evening light.

"What do _you_ feel for him?" 

Jo is silent for a long moment. “Well, I suppose I love him," she says, eventually. 

Amy nods, and turns to face her. "You know, I don't know him the way you do," she says. "Not all the way through. I probably never will. But I like that. I like that I'll never get to the end."

Jo nods, and watches Laurie laugh as they walk up the drive, his face so familiar and loved. She looks sideways at Amy.

"I'm glad it worked out like this," she says, and, only partly surprised, realises she means it. 

* * *

The sight of Frieda in the March house is so unexpected that it makes Jo’s home look new again, like a kind of surreal optical illusion. She can’t stop herself from looking back at her, something sparking in her throat again and again as she does. 

Marmee had recognised her name instantly, and the rest of the family is quite ready to welcome her into conversation as soon as they understand she’s Jo’s New York friend, and Frieda for her part faces the March onslaught with aplomb. For most of the evening, Jo doesn’t think anyone else is finding it as strange as she is; nobody seems to be noticing the way that she’s flickering between two selves. 

Then Frieda sits down at Beth’s piano, and the room fills with music for the first time in long months, and Jo lets out a breath she hadn’t known she’d been holding. They sit listening in silence for what seems like a long, long time, and when Frieda is finished, she lifts her hands from the keys and smiles at Jo, uncertain and happy. Jo can call to mind a hundred instances when Beth had performed that same gesture, and her eyes suddenly feel hot. 

They look at each other for a long time and Jo finally realises that Frieda is really here; she’d never thought she’d see her again, but she’s here. There are a hundred things Jo wants to say, but she can’t catch hold of any of them long enough to put them into words, so she settles back for smiling back, as hard as she can.

Marmee won't hear of Frieda leaving for the evening train and makes up Amy's old bed for her, in the room that used to belong to the younger March sisters.

"I wouldn't send my Jo out in the dark," she says, firmly, as the subsidiary March families spill noisily out of the door. "If you don't need to leave urgently, stay the night and you can leave in the morning with a full stomach. Stay a few nights, even. As many as you can."

"Thank you," Frieda says, sounding more unsurely pleased than Jo has ever heard her. She looks different, now, or maybe Jo regards her differently. In New York she'd been more of a type of person than a person. Here, out of place, she makes Jo think of the end of the Winter's Tale, remembering the book she still has upstairs in her garret with a pleased glow for the first time in months. That unfathomable statue and its impossible magic trick: blood quickening, beginning to move, coming home, warm with the strangeness and possibility of life.

She lies in bed wide awake for what feels like a very long time, suddenly feeling so light that it's a struggle to stay horizontal. Eventually she gives up and swings her legs out of bed, pulling on her gown and lighting her candle, hurrying downstairs with an eagerness that makes her clumsy.

It's utterly silent there, the memory of last night's laughter and conversation the faintest of echoes, and Jo stands frozen in the doorway for a second, heart plunging. 

Then she sees a light flickering outside the window in the grey pre-dawn glow, and without consciously deciding to, she shoves her feet into her shoes and slips outside. 

Frieda is sitting on the steps with her own candle, her hair in a long plait down her back. She turns and looks at Jo without much surprise, but smiles a small secret smile that makes Jo's face flush. 

"Here we are again," she says.

"Couldn't you sleep?" Jo says, sitting down next to her. The stone is dully cold under her and she shivers lightly. "How long have you been out here?"

"A little while," Frieda says. "Your home is beautiful. I'm glad to have seen it."

"I'm sorry for what I said," Jo says, apropos of nothing. "Back in New York. I don't mean it anymore."

Frieda shrugs. "I was worried when you left."

"It was because of Beth," Jo says. Her throat hurts, and she hugs her knees.

"I wish I could have met her," Frieda says.

"Me too," Jo says. "She would have liked you."

"I should not have been so hard on you," Frieda says. "There was a better way to say it. I hope you didn't take it to heart."

"No, you were right," Jo says. "I didn't know what I was talking about. All those romances."

"It's hard to write about love," Frieda says. "To put the truth between two people into words."

"Especially when you're not even sure what it feels like," Jo says. 

Frieda pauses. "Yes," she says, her voice curiously flat. "Especially then."

Jo rolls her head to the side and looks at her. "Are you leaving in the morning?"

"I think so," Frieda says. "You've been kind, all of you. But I think I must go. I'll buy my ticket in the morning."

"Out west?" Jo says. 

"A cousin of mine is looking for a teacher for his children," she says, shrugging. "And I have reached the end of all I can teach the Misses Kirke."

"Oh," Jo says. Her throat still hurts, a painful ache that makes it hard to swallow. It's strange to think that she'd been so sure that she would never see Frieda again, before yesterday. Now it seems obvious that they would meet again, if only to say goodbye. 

"And what about you?" Frieda says. "What will you do?"

Jo blinks and comes back to herself. "Well, I've been talking to my sisters about starting a school," she says. "My aunt left me her house. For girls. Well, and boys. But especially girls."

Frieda smiles at her. "That fits you," she says. "No hitting, hm?" 

"No," Jo says. The chill of the very early morning seems to have receded with their candles, and she thinks of Mrs Kirke's kitchen, where the background noise of New York had been a constant faint refrain. It's very quiet here, the clouds on the horizon scudding slowly towards them, lit dimly from below. 

"And your writing?"

"I don't know," Jo says. It's harder to say to her than it was to say to her sisters, to Marmee. It feels like an admission of defeat. "I finished my novel, but I don't think I'll get anything for it. It was – it was different from the kind of story I wrote before. I don't know if I'll write anything else like it."

"I think you will surprise yourself, Jo March," Frieda says. 

"Well," Jo says, "I always seem to be surprised somehow, anyway."

Frieda turns her head and studies her. Their eyes catch in a long moment, and something seems to shift somewhere deep in the recesses of Jo's mind, a ship long-grounded in the sand inching suddenly forward after some imperceptible change in the earth's drifting plates below. She doesn't know how to make sense of it; as the seconds spool out, she forgets why she needs to. 

Then Frieda looks down and the moment breaks. "We should go back inside. You haven't got a coat."

"You should get some rest before you go," Jo agrees, her heart pounding, inexplicably.

* * *

Marmee hugs Frieda before she leaves, warm and close, and whispers something in her ear that Jo isn’t close enough to make out. Frieda blinks at her when she draws away, looking younger than Jo’s ever seen her.

“Well, goodbye,” Jo says, when it’s her turn, trying hard at a smile. 

“Goodbye,” Frieda says, standing in front of her. She’s looking at Jo so intently, as though Jo has something better, more beautiful and important to say to her than just a sparse little goodbye. Jo finds herself wanting. “If you’re ever in California –”

“I don’t know that I will be,” Jo says, because she can’t bear the prospect of knowing it could be possible to see Frieda again, and not doing it; better to make it final now. “But – thank you. For everything.”

Frieda looks at her for another long moment, before ducking her head. “Thank you, Jo. Mrs March.”

“Well, Jo, why don’t you walk Miss Bhaer to the station?” Marmee says. When Jo turns to her she realises that she’s been watching Jo, too, with a complicated look: anxious and empathetic and keenly understanding, somehow, of something Jo doesn’t understand herself. She looks behind her at Father, her sisters, Laurie, all of whom had wanted to say goodbye. 

There’s a strange edge in the air, one that she recognises from yesterday, and she realises for the first time how straight her family had all been sitting, almost on ceremony, with respect for this friend of Jo’s that not even Jo really knows. They’ve been worried, she thinks. They want Jo to be happy.

"Go on, Jo, we haven't got all day," Amy says imperiously. Laurie huffs out a laugh and tucks her hand fondly into his arm. 

She looks back at Frieda, who looks a little nervous herself. 

"Well, if you don't mind –"

"Of course," Frieda says. "Of course, come with me."

"Take the big umbrella, Jo, it might rain," Marmee says, practically, and then they're on their way. She'd been right; the clouds Jo had seen gathering all those hours ago are creeping closer and closer, heavy with rain. 

It's not a long walk to the station, and they won't have much time, but for some reason, Jo can't think of anything to say. She stares at her feet, watching the earth below them. 

"Do you remember _Twelfth Night_?" Frieda says suddenly. "When we danced afterwards?"

"How long ago it seems," Jo says.

"I've always loved that play," Frieda says. 

"I know," says Jo. "You told me. The ending isn't as neat," adding, darkly, "even if everyone does get married in the end."

"Not poor Malvolio," Frieda says. "Nor Olivia, really. Sebastian is not the boy Cesario, after all."

"But it's so sad," Jo says. "Cesario was made up. She was doomed never to be happy right from the start."

"I don't know," Frieda says. "The name was false, even the words may have been false, but the body was solid and real, Viola or Cesario."

"I guess," Jo says. Frieda looks at her.

"Sometimes there isn't an easy ending," she says, gently. "It doesn't make the rest of the story bad." 

Jo can't quite meet her eye. She blinks hard, and says, brightly, "I think that's rain, after all. Maybe you'd better take the umbrella and go on by yourself – I'll run home." 

There's a long pause. "Are you sure?" Frieda says, voice level. Jo nods, swallowing, and smiles at her, brittle. 

Frieda looks at her again for a long moment, inscrutable, before nodding. "Goodbye, then."

There's a faint suggestion of something catching in her throat, but before Jo can take much notice of it, she puts the umbrella up, and leaves. 

Jo stands and watches her walk away, her shoulders curled in defeatedly under her umbrella like nobody loves her. It's unbearable. It's worse than turning Laurie down; worse than writing a letter taking it back, worse than throwing the letter in the river, because Jo can't remember why she's letting it happen. 

"Wait," she says to herself, then louder. "Wait!"

The rain is starting to fall now, big droplets that she knows will soak her through by the time she gets home. She runs the opposite way instead, and catches up in just a few seconds. 

"Wait," she says again, and Frieda spins around. Her hair is escaping again from its confines, curling in the rain even as Jo watches.

"What?" Frieda says after a second. Jo shakes herself. 

"Come and teach at my school," she says, breathless. She isn't exactly sure why she hadn't thought of it before, or even if she had thought of it but decided against it, because of some strange resistance in her own mind, but now it seems like there's no more perfect solution. "You could teach the girls music. You'd be brilliant at it – I know you would."

"Okay," Frieda says, but her shoulders are still tense.

"I don't want you to go," Jo says. "I don't want to never see you again."

"Okay," Frieda says again. 

"I want –" Suddenly she's seized by a feeling too vague and unformed to be called a realisation; more a recognition of the thing that's been slipping unsaid through their whole conversation, in all the time they've known each other. 

"This is what I want," she says, and takes Frieda's hands in her own. The umbrella is tucked in the crook of Frieda's arm, and tilts precariously over them, offering meagre protection from the rain, coming down in sheets around them, driving everyone else indoors. 

Frieda stares down at her, and Jo is seized with anxiety that she's misjudged something. "That is, if you –"

"Jo," Frieda says, and bends down to touch their lips together. It's barely there, over before it happens, but it sweeps through Jo like a wave, leaving her feeling as though something fundamental in her body has been shaken loose. She holds onto Frieda's hands, hard enough that it must hurt. 

"I don't have anything to offer you," Frieda is saying. "You could have a life like your sisters – a home, a family –"

"I have those things," Jo says. "I don't _want_ a life like my sisters. And that's not true."

"Not now, perhaps, but –"

"I know my mind," Jo says, certain like she hasn't been in months. "I know what I want. Doesn't it seem obvious to you?" She picks up their hands and gestures between them, the space between their hearts. "Doesn't it make sense, here?"

Frieda says nothing for a long moment, before, like an admission of something, saying, "I told my cousin I'd go and teach his daughters."

"So come back," Jo says. 

"You might change your mind."

"I won't," Jo says. " _You_ might."

"I won't," Frieda says. They look at each other. The rain is beginning to ease, as suddenly as it began. 

Somewhere in America, a letter is being written. _Dear Miss March, I am pleased to inform you…_

Aunt March had known what she was doing, Jo realises, abstractedly. Or even if she hadn't, even if she'd meant Jo's independence as a kind of curse, it would have been because she didn't know about this, the live current that could run between a person and another person in a closed loop. But it's changing Jo from the inside, making her see things outside of it differently: the school, her writing. Suddenly a possible life is creating itself before her eyes, where it would all fit, like magic. 

In a few weeks, Jo will be back in Mr Dashwood's office, and he'll ask her, "So did she marry the neighbour?"

And Jo will say, no, it wasn't the right ending, and he'll tell her, "Nobody will buy your book if your heroine ends up a spinster," and she'll look at him, considering what matters most. The money, the fame, the words on the page, the truth between two people, invisible from the outside. 

But for now, the moment is suspended in the fresh, green-smelling air like a bird gliding soundlessly through the sky. It's not an ending at all. Nothing ever was. 

**Author's Note:**

> Also apologies to Shakespeare, I haven't read or watched AYLI or Twelfth Night in a hot minute so have possibly misrepresented them but I love them both and am at all times thinking about a lecture I went to five years ago where the lecturer talked about how there are more fics for Twelfth Night right here on ye olde AO3 than there are for AYLI despite the similar themes and content because there's something that feels unfinished at the end of Twelfth Night, something that invites speculation and creativity.


End file.
